Category Archives: Presidential Politics

When Evelyn Farkus voluntarily acknowledged on MSNBC incidental surveillance of the Trump campaign and transition teams, a media fracas ensued despite the best efforts of the so-called mainstream media to suppress the story. Now Susan Rice of Benghazi notoriety has been implicated in the unmasking phase of the incidental surveillance operation. Whether any of this incidental surveillance was illegal remains to be seen, but commonsense suggests that the Farkus fracus is eerily reminiscent of the abuses of power uncovered in the Watergate scandal … drip … drip … drip.

Commonsense also suggests that all surveillance operations by the Obama Administration of political opponents, legal or illegal, will eventually be unmasked and if illegal the person(s) responsible will be held accountable.

POTUS press conference yesterday was a very refreshing breath of fresh air from a President displaying the vintage form that got him elected. After nearly 100 years of progressive, liberal politics from the republican and democrat establishment, the proverbial political pendulum has begun to swing back to traditional center-right American values; and not any too soon.

Someone once famously said that Americans will eventually do the right thing but not before exhausting all other alternatives. Commonsense tells me that the American people did the right thing when they elected Donald Trump. Commonsense also tells me that if democrats keep up the politically correct nonsense much longer, the democrat party will soon be headed to the ash heap of history, along with their liberal progressive policies and friends in the so-called mainstream media.

I apologize upfront for the length of this post, but I found the commonsense observations on the recent election of the 45th President of the United States of America by an Irish journalist so compelling that I could not resist republishing these observations here. These observations are contained in a column recently published in the Irish Independent by Ian O’Doherty entitled ‘An Irish reflection on the 2016 Election in the Colonies.” What follows are the Irishman’s observations verbatim:

“Tuesday November 8, 2016 — a day that will live in infamy, or the moment when America was made great again?

The truth, as ever, will lie somewhere in the middle. After all, contrary to what both his supporters and detractors believe — and this is probably the only thing they agree on — Trump won’t be able to come into office and spend his first 100 days gleefully ripping up all the bits of the Constitution he doesn’t like.

But even if this week’s seismic shockwave doesn’t signal either the sky falling in or the start of a bright new American era, the result was, to use one of The Donald’s favourite phrases, huge. It is, in fact, a total game changer.

In decades to come, historians will still bicker about the most poisonous, toxic and stupid election in living memory.

They will also be bickering over the same vexed question: how did a man who was already unpopular with the public and who boasted precisely zero political experience beat a seasoned Washington insider who was married to one extremely popular president and who had worked closely with another?

The answer, ultimately, is in the question.

History will record this as a Trump victory, which of course it is. But it was also more than that, because this was the most stunning self-inflicted defeat in the history of Western democracy.

Hillary Clinton has damned her party to irrelevance for at least the next four years. She has also ensured that Obama’s legacy will now be a footnote rather than a chapter. Because the Affordable Care Act is now doomed under a Trump presidency and that was always meant to be his gift, of sorts, to America.

How did a candidate who had virtually all of the media, all of Hollywood, every celebrity you could think of, a couple of former presidents and apparently, the hopes of an entire gender resting on her shoulders, blow up her own campaign?

I rather suspect that neither Donald nor Hillary know how they got to this point.

Where she seemed to expect the position to become available to her by right — the phrase “she deserves it” was used early in the campaign and then quickly dropped when her team remembered that Americans don’t like inherited power — his first steps into the campaign were those of someone chancing their arm. If he wasn’t such a staunch teetotaller, many observers would have accused him of only doing it as a drunken bet.

But the more the campaign wore on, something truly astonishing began to happen: the people began to speak. And they began to speak in a voice which, for the first time in years in the American heartland, would not be ignored.

Few of the people who voted for Trump seriously believe that he is going to personally improve their fortunes. Contrary to the smug, middle-class media narrative, they aren’t all barely educated idiots.

They know what he is, of course they do. It’s what he is not that appeals to them.

Clinton, on the other hand, had come to represent the apex of smug privilege. Whether it was boasting about her desire to shut down the remaining coal industry in Virginia — that worked out well for her, in the end — or calling half the electorate a “basket of deplorables,” she seemed to operate in the perfumed air of the elite, more obsessed with coddling idiots and pandering to identity and feelings than improving the hardscrabble life that is the lot of millions of Americans.

Also, nobody who voted for Trump did so because they wanted him as a spiritual guru or life coach.

But plenty of people invested an irrational amount of emotional energy into a woman who was patently undeserving of that level of adoration.

That’s why we’ve witnessed such fury from her supporters — they had wrapped themselves so tightly in the Hillary flag that a rejection of her felt like a rejection of them. And when you consider that many American colleges gave their students Wednesday off class because they were too “upset” to study, you can see that this wasn’t a battle for the White House — this became a genuine battle for America’s future direction. And, indeed, for the West. (Emphasis mine)

We have been going through a cultural paroxysm for the last 10 years — the rise of identity politics has created a Balkanised society where the content of someone’s mind is less important than their skin colour, gender, sexuality or whatever other attention-seeking label they wish to bestow upon themselves.

In fact, where once it looked like racism and sexism might be becoming archaic remnants of a darker time, a whole new generation has popped up which wants to re-litigate all those arguments all over again.

In fact, while many of us are too young to recall the Vietnam War and the social upheaval of the 1960s, plenty of observers who were say they haven’t seen an America more at war with itself than it is today.

One perfect example of this New America has been the renewed calls for segregation on campuses. Even a few years ago, such a move would have been greeted with understandable horror by civil rights activists — but this time it’s the black students demanding segregation and “safe spaces” from whites. If young people calling for racial segregation from each other isn’t the sign of a very, very sick society, nothing is.

The irony of Clinton calling Trump and his followers racist while she was courting Black Lives Matter was telling.

After all, no rational white person would defend the KKK, yet here was a white women defending both BLM and the New Black Panthers — explicitly racist organisations with the NBP, in particularly, openly espousing a race war if they don’t get what they want.

Fundamentally, Trump was attractive because he represents a repudiation of the nonsense that has been slowly strangling the West.

He represents — rightly or wrongly, and the dust has still to settle — a scorn and contempt for these new rules. He won’t be a president worried about microaggressions, or listening to the views of patently insane people just because they come from a fashionably protected group.

He also represents a glorious two fingers to everyone who has become sick of being called a racist or a bigot or a homophobe — particularly by Hillary supporters who are too dense to realise that she has always actually been more conservative on social issues than Trump.

That it might take a madman to restore some sanity to America is, I suppose, a quirk that is typical to that great nation — land of the free and home to more contradictions than anyone can imagine.

Trump’s victory also signals just how out of step the media has been with the people. Not just American media, either.

In fact, the Irish media has continued its desperate drive to make a show of itself with a seemingly endless parade of emotionally incontinent gibberish that, ironically, has increased in ferocity and hysterical spite in the last few days.

The fact that Hillary’s main cheerleaders in the Irish and UK media still haven’t realised where they went wrong is instructive and amusing in equal measure. They still don’t seem to understand that by constantly insulting his supporters, they’re just making asses of themselves.

One female contributor to this newspaper said Trump’s victory was a “sad day for women.” Well, not for the women who voted for him, it wasn’t.

But that really is the nub of the matter — the “wrong” kind of women obviously voted for Trump. The “right” kind went with Hillary. And lost.

The Irish media is not alone in being filled largely with dinner-party liberals who have never had an original or socially awkward thought in their lives. They simply assume that everyone lives in the same bubble and thinks the same thoughts — and if they don’t, they should.

Of the many things that have changed with Trump’s victory, the bubble has burst. Never in American history have the polls, the media and the chin-stroking moral arbiters of the liberal agenda been so spectacularly, wonderfully wrong.

It was exactly that condescending, obnoxious sneer towards the working class that brought them out in such numbers, and that is the great irony of Election 16 — the Left spent years creating identity politics to the extent that the only group left without protection or a celebrity sponsor was the white American male.

That it was the white American male who swung it for Trump is a timely reminder that while black lives matter, all votes count — even the ones of people you despise.

You don’t have to be a supporter of Trump to take great delight in the sheer, apoplectic rage that has greeted his victory.

If Clinton had won and Trump supporters had gone on a rampage through a dozen American cities the next night, there would have been outrage — and rightly so.

But in a morally and linguistically inverted society, the wrong-doers are portrayed as the victims. We saw that at numerous Trump rallies: protesters would disrupt the event, claiming their right to free speech (a heckler’s veto is not free speech) and provoking people until they got a dig before running to the media and claiming victimhood.

But, ultimately, this election was about people saying enough with the bullshit. This is a country in crisis, and most Americans don’t care about transgender bathrooms, or safe spaces, or government speech laws. This was about people taking some control back for themselves.

It was about them saying that they won’t be hectored and bullied by the toddler tantrums thrown by pissy and spoiled millennials, and they certainly won’t put up with being told they’re stupid and wicked just because they have a difference of opinion.

But, really, this election is about hope for a better America; an America which isn’t obsessed with identity and perceived “privilege;” an America where being a victim isn’t a virtue and where you don’t have to apologise for not being up to date with the latest list of socially acceptable phrases.

Trump’s victory was a two fingers to the politically correct.

It was a brutal rejection of the nonsense narrative which says Muslims who kill Americans are somehow victims. It took the ludicrous Green agenda and threw it out. It was a return, on some level, to a time when people weren’t afraid to speak their own mind without some self-elected language cop shouting at you. Who knows, we may even see Trump kicking the UN out of New York.

Frankly, if you’re one of those who gets their politics from Jon Stewart and Twitter, look away for the next four years, because you’re not going to like what you see. The rest of us, however, will be delighted.

This might go terribly, terribly wrong. Nobody knows — and if we have learned anything this week, it’s that nobody knows nuthin’.

But just as the people of the UK took control back with Brexit, the people of America did likewise with their choice for president.”

I hope you will share the foregoing with your family and friends. Good Day!

After the Democrats suffered sweeping election losses at the federal, state and local level across the country in the midterm elections in 2010 and 2014, the promise of ‘hope and change’ finally arrived in 2016 as the Republicans continued to make gains across the country, taking control of the U.S. Congress and the Presidency in the process. While some Democrats may see no hope, commonsense tells me that the vast majority of Americans who represent the working-class backbone of the nation, including a lot of life-long democrats, are very hopeful that things will improve under Republican leadership.

Commonsense tells me that if there is not clear evidence of such improvement soon, the voters will again exercise their power to block unwise policies of the party in power like they did is 2010 when the Democrats overreached by enacting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act without a single supporting Republican vote. Commonsense also tells me that the political nonsense will soon stop as a long overdue return to bipartisan governance takes hold over the next eight years when elected officials at last come to realize that the voters will not tolerate anything less anymore.

The results of the American presidential election in 2016 demonstrates that the so-called Trump Phenomenon was a very real political movement which, like Brexit in the UK, rejected the progressive political establishment which has not served the middle class in America or the UK, or any place else on the planet, very well in the last 100 years.

Commonsense tells me that a flawed, but likable and basically honest, businessman accustomed to producing results on time and within budget, finally put an end to the failed, over-reaching progressive agenda of the 44th President of the United States of America, as represented by the unlikable and dishonest presidential nominee of the Democrat party in 2016.

Commonsense also tells me that the world is better off today on the eve of the administration of the 45th President of the United States of America than it has been for quite sometime.

According to Hillary Clinton, half of Trump supporters can be put into a basket of deplorables. That she now expresses regrets in response to the firestorm does not erase the comments which shows her elitist attitude toward the vast majority of American citizens. It tops the elitist remarks Mitt Romney made in the 2012 presidential campaign which may very well have cost him the election. You cannot make this stuff up.

A famous person once said that Americans will always do the right thing, but not before exhausting all other alternatives. Commonsense tells me that all alternatives have now been exhausted. Commonsense also tells me that the American deplorables are about to do the right thing again.

The so-called mainstream media pundits have been wondering during the entire primary election season why Donald Trump has not by now suffered his comeuppance (pronounced comeuppe’nce). Now that Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for President of the United States of America, these same pudits will still be wondering when Donald Trump becomes the President-Elect of the United States of America on November 8, 2016, and the 45th President of the United States of America on January 20, 2017, how it all happened, against their better judgment.

With all the problems facing the presumptive nominee of the Democrat Party for President of the United States of America in 2016 (Hilary Clinton), commonsense tells me that the Presidential election of 2016 is now Donald Trump’s to lose. Commonsense also tells me that Donald Trump will win the Presidency if he tones down his rhetoric a bit, focuses on the issues and Hillary’s problems and continues to surround himself with knowledgeable and competent conservatives like Mike Pence. If that happens, the Trump-Pence ticket will not suffer a Trump-Up-Pence!

After an exhaustive explanation of why the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was unconstitutional, the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, writing for the majority, decided that Obama care was constitutional after all as a tax. After an exhaustive explanation of the evidence showing that the presumptive Democrat Nominee for President of the United States of America, while serving as Secretary of State, was extremely careless in handling classified emails in violation of at least one federal criminal statute the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation decided that no reasonable prosecutor would bring criminal charges based on that evidence. Both decisions defy logic and commonsense and demonstrate a cowardly lack of integrity at the highest levels of the American government.

It is now up to the American people to decide whether to change the American government. The decision begins with the Presidential Election in November 2016. Commonsense tells me that the vast majority of American citizens want to change things. Commonsense also tells me that too many American voters, dependent on the status quo, will not allow change, unless the vast majority of American citizens who want to do the right thing actually turn out to vote in November, 2016. It just might happen.

Perhaps the ultimate achievement of liberal progressive politicians in 20th century Europe was the establishment of the EU. Fed up with borderless nation states, unrestricted immigration, multi-culturalism and regional economic integration, a narrow majority of British voters, comprised mostly of older working class, less educated citizens, decided that Great Britain will exit the EU. There will surely be more votes like Brexit in other EU countries in the near future. The future of the EU is now certainly in question, and with it the future of the liberal progressive political movement.

The dissatisfaction with established liberal progressive politicians is also being manifested in America, as evidenced by the Trump phenomenon. The 2016 presidential election is shaping up to be a vote on whether America should exit from the liberal progressive movement which has dominated American politics for most of the last 100 years. Commonsense tells me that such an exit is more likely than not, probably also by a narrow margin similar to Brexit.

Commonsense also tells me that the new majority, however narrow, will not break along traditional political party lines. The new majority will stretch across a broad spectrum of citizens fed up with political correctness, unrestricted immigration, underemployment , runaway national debt, military indecision against radical Islamic terrorism and, most importantly, the establishment politicians on both sides of the aisle who have created the mess.

The dictionary definition of a presumption is the belief that something is true that has not yet been proven to be true. In spite of nearly 60 million votes cast by Republican and Democrat primary voters, delegate revolts at the Democrat and Republican conventions are possible in 2016 given the high unfavorable ratings among the electorate of both so-called presumptive nominees due to serious character and temperament issues, not to mention the knock-out blow that will be inflicted on the presumptive Democrat nominee in the event of an unfavorable outcome of the FBI’s criminal investigation of her email practices while serving as Secretary of State.

Commonsense tells me that it is far from certain that the requisite proof will be forthcoming for either of the so-called presumptive nominees of the two major political parties for President of the United States of America in 2016 to actually secure the nomination of their respective parties.

Good Day! Stay tuned for additional commentary following the Republican and Democrat conventions in July 2016.